Preston Hensley, PhD, is a consultant in Translational and Systems Medicine. He is a former Senior Director in the Pfizer BioInnovation and Biotechnology Center. He joined the group in December of 2007 and focused on collaborative alliances between the Pfizer scientific organization and the greater Boston research community. A major effort in that group was to set up the Insulin Resistance Pathways Project. This was a 14 MM$ three year effort between Pfizer, MIT, UMass, UCSB, Cal Tech and Entelos aimed at using systems biology to identify a new class of diabetes drug discovery targets.
His current effort extends this approach, now focusing on drug resistance in breast cancer, to start, and drug resistance generally. He is the leader of a multinational translational medicine collaboration of basic researchers and clinicians. This will be one of the first projects out of the pharmaceutical sector of Skolkovo, a national effort of Russian Federation to develop technology in five areas (space and telecom, pharmaceuticals, energy efficiency, information and nuclear technology). This project will be a roughly 50 MM$ effort over five years, with research hubs in Cambridge, MA, Edinburgh and Moscow.
Dr. Hensley joined Pfizer in 1998, as the Manager of Protein Chemistry in the Global Research and Development organization in Groton, CT. The group was expanded to Protein and Peptide Chemistry in 1999. In 2002, he was appointed Director of Protein and Cell Science and was responsible for production and functional characterization of proteins, peptides, eukaryotic and prokaryotic cells in support of exploratory drug discovery, high throughput screening, structure-based drug design, ADMET screen design and execution, and biomarker development. In 2003 he was appointed a Pfizer Science Ambassador. In this role, he has interacted with Members of Congress, leaders from the NIH and a number of internal and external groups to explain the process of drug discovery and the value of new medicines to healthcare delivery in the nation.
Preston received BA and MS degrees in analytical biology from the University of California Santa Barbara and a doctorate in biochemistry from Cornell University. He did postdoctoral work with Howard Schachman at UC Berkeley, where he was a Fellow of the Miller Institute of Basic Research in Science and a Lecturer in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry.